A Contrastive Study Between Different Translation Of English Passive Voice

As one of the frequently used expressions in English, passive voice has always been the focus of researchers. The translation of passive voice not only plays an important role in translation textbooks, but also is studied as research projects. Although the translation of passive voice has yielded fruitful results, there are also some problems: monotonous research methods. Most studies just propose translation methods first and then serve with examples; translation method analysis limits to syntactic level; a lack of theoretical research; monotonous research sample for that most studies are directed at the translation of English passive voice in the text of science, technology and law. In general these texts belong to one category that is"information text".Focusing on these problems, this research will make a study on the translation of English passive voice. Based on Newmark's text-type theory, the thesis respectively chooses three texts form each type: autobiography in expressive text, convention in informative text, as well as selected campaign speeches in vocative text. It aims to summarize the translation methods of English passive voice in different text types and make a statistic on the use frequency of different translation methods to check the distribution of these methods in each text. Through analyzing, the thesis founds that among the ten methods inducted by Liu Miqing, the first, second, third, eighth and the ninth methods are often used in all three texts, while there are also some differences. In the expressive text, the second method is most adopted which accounts for one half of the whole adopted methods; Author's anonymous is the greatest feature of informative text, thus the third method is comparatively greatly employed, namely to translate into implied passive voice sentence. In addition, the tenth method, that is to translate into other phrases or constructions, especially by using the phrases like"加以","予以","给予"to plus object to construct verb phrase form, is also often applied; Vocative text puts readers'status in the first place and it pays much attention to readers'response. In the translation process of this type of text, translator should use expressions as close as possible to the target language. Therefore, except the second method which keeps accordance with the expression habits of Chinese, free translation is another method that is greatly adopted in vocative texts. At last, from the aspects of text function and language characteristics, the author mainly analyzes the reasons of the adoption of different translation methods in different texts.This research is respected to provide some guidance on translation teaching. Under the direction of teacher, students can select proper translation methods pointedly in considering different texts; thereby further improve their translation quality and efficiency. At the same time, the research aims to make a supplement to the study of English passive voice translation from the aspects of theory and practice.